Wyoming Gets its First CAVE

MARSHALLTOWN, IOWA —Mechdyne Corporation in February will begin installation of a four-sided CAVE in the Energy Innovation Center (EIC) at the University of Wyoming campus at Laramie.

The Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) facility will help the University of Wyoming faculty, students and industry experts collaborate on energy research.

The university will have Wyoming’s only CAVE – a room-sized advanced visualization solution that combines high-resolution, stereoscopic projection and 3-D computer graphics to create a complete sense of presence in a virtual environment.

“The Mechdyne CAVE complements the primary function of the EIC – to help faculty, students and industry experts collaborate and create ‘what-if’ scenarios,” said Brent Redman, account manager for Mechdyne. “The CAVE is an amazing tool for discovery. It allows many users to experience a virtual environment at the same time, helping them analyze and interpret a wide variety of spatially related data.”

The CAVE, which was designed, engineered and integrated by Mechdyne, will be housed in the 3D Visualization Research Lab at the EIC, which is a newly constructed LEED building connected to one of the largest supercomputers in the world, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Wyoming Supercomputing Center located in Cheyenne

“One use of the lab will be the ability to model how oil, gas, and water move and interact in the subsurface,” said Diana Hulme, deputy director of research at University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources. “We hope this will lead to new technologies that increase recovery from unconventional reservoirs. Rather than viewing data on a small screen in 2D, researchers can be immersed in a 3D image created from that data, providing for analysis of a more realisticsituation. We want it to be a campus-wide teaching resource.”

The contract to design, engineer, integrate and install the CAVE solution was awarded to Mechdyne in October 2012; installation will begin in January 2013, with completion scheduled in March.

Users of CAVE technologies include universities, scientific research organizations, oil & gas and other energy companies, and manufacturing and design organizations.